


Sing Me to Sleep

by seekingmoonscapes



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Black Widow - Freeform, Gen, Minor Character Death, Red Room, pre-avengers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 16:02:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/915194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingmoonscapes/pseuds/seekingmoonscapes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was singing in Russian. The girl wouldn’t understand the words, but it was the only lullaby Natalia knew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sing Me to Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this is also the title of the song by Ella Fitzgerald whose lyrics are quoted at the beginning and the end of this drabble. It is a beautiful, haunting melody which seemed to fit Natasha perfectly to me.

_Every night you hear her croon_  
 _a Russian lullaby._  
 _Just a little plaintive tune_  
 _when baby starts to cry._

The girl’s sobs had quietened, her small body too tired to make any more tears, but for some reason Natalia couldn’t stop stroking her tangled, bloody hair. She wasn’t sure if the motion was comforting. Comfort was not something she was used to giving.

She was singing in Russian. The girl wouldn’t understand the words, but it was the only lullaby Natalia knew. It wasn’t even a real lullaby. She didn’t know where it had come from; none of the girls had known. But Natalia remembered it being sang to her that first night, though she could no longer remember the girl who sang it to her, when she’d lay shaking in her bed, afraid but ignorant of the true horrors of the world; remembered singing it to the girls that came after her, though she could no longer remember their faces or their names. Now, it had made its way to this girl, this normal girl, who’d had a normal family and a clean, normal life stretched out ahead of her. She might have been first girl outside of the Red Room to ever hear it. She might be the last girl who would ever hear it.

It was a small, fragile tune, one that had grown in silence, designed to be hummed so low it could barely be heard. And like the small, fragile girls it was sang to, it hid a quiet strength and a hope for a future that was free. A future Natalia knew to be a lie, dreamt up by children who had nothing else; a future she sang to this child, to whom it was, as it had been to those who had come before her, a shield from truth.

Natalia sang it until the girl finally stilled beneath her hand, her small lungs releasing her final broken breath.

_Rock-a-bye, my baby._  
 _Somewhere there may be_  
 _a land that’s free, for you and me_  
 _and a Russian lullaby._


End file.
